Londonderry News

He’s all lean, mean fighting machine now.  170 lbs of wiry muscle; not an inch of fat on the kid.  Six months at The Basic School at Quantico has seen to that – on top of four years of daily training during his ROTC college years, a month at Mountain Warfare School, and a summer at Office Candidate School.  Squeezing in that landscaping job every summer may have added a bit more to the conditioning, but the other stuff certainly built most of this young man.

Fifteen mile hikes with 100-lb packs, intense land navigation exercises, grueling obstacle courses, trudging waist-deep through swamps, streams, and muck and lugging around a SAW M249 machine gun with extended magazines of ammunition to feed the thing certainly also contributed to building this well-rounded Marine.

Throw in the added mental stress that he and his fellow 2nd Lieutenants were put through by other officers and, most importantly, by hardened NCOs who’ve already lived the realities of their future.  All to mold them into Marine Corps officers, as they strive for the honor and privilege of soon leading their own Marines into whatever situations they are handed.  To make life or death decisions on the spot, because chances are, they’ll probably have to do that sometime in their careers.  And outwardly, our young Marine seems ready for that too.

Next, he’ll head for Fort Knox where soldiers train Marines to become tank commanders, among the usual inter-service rivalries and barbs that sometimes jokingly, sometimes not, occur whenever the Army and the Marine Corps get together.  You might say it‘s a “tradition of mutual jibing”.  And after that, he’ll deploy to wherever the Corps needs him.

So you’d expect that this proud Marine, fully-tested on the training ground, although not yet in the line of war, would be a giant mass of ego and strength, glaring intensity in his eye and a snarl on his lips.  Serious to the core.  Gung-ho to go, Oorah and all.

Until he came home for Thanksgiving last month with his girlfriend – brandishing, dare I say, the same bright little boy smile that he always had.  And like the kid that he really is, he asked his mother – just wondering – if she was going to make those sugar cookies this year for Christmas, because he really wanted to help.  He always liked putting the frosting on them.  And he wanted to know if we were going to buy our Christmas tree while he was home that weekend.  Because he always liked when we would go out as a family to pick one out.  He was even excited – and I daresay eager – to string up the Christmas lights – until he ran into my usual problem of some of them working and some not.  So he had to tear them all down and start again.  We could tell he was internally cursing himself for that, but he kept it to himself and smiled in the end, a lesson in patience that we wouldn’t have seen in him as a kid.

He rummaged through our vast haphazard collection of old VHS tapes that weekend, and we all relived our family history one night, especially that footage of him, at the age of five, struggling to get out of a Porta-Potty at the local apple orchard and yelling to me, as I filmed this from the outside, “Dad!  Dad!  I can’t get out!”

We had a great Thanksgiving Day too and he relished our traditional time at my sister’s house, gathered with his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins over a meal much too vast for those 15 people.  And he was truly bummed out that I would be late for that feast because I had to work.  I was touched by his disappointment.

That weekend, he was full of the memories and dreams of his childhood, our chiseled Marine.  A big kid at heart, like even the toughest of guys when you peel back the layers.  Thankfully, at 22, he doesn’t have that many layers yet…

He returned to Quantico after that weekend, once again the 2nd lieutenant.  And we traveled there to watch him graduate from The Basic School, another proud moment for us.  But he won’t be home for Christmas this year, probably the main reason why he wanted to experience so much of the holidays while he was here – and those memories that no one can take away.  Regardless of his military path and the challenges he faces in that role, to his parents, he’ll still always be the little boy who couldn’t find his way around a Porta-Potty 16 years ago.   I think we deserve that.

And for all those other families who won’t have the kids home for Christmas this year – some of you, I know, never again – take comfort in the memories of your kids and those special times you shared together.  Because you deserve that.

Merry Christmas to all from the Paradis family.

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